Slavery first began in the Chesapeake Bay in 1619 with the arrival of
a Dutch trading vessel in Jamestown, Virginia. The ship carried
twenty men from Africa who were brought to America with the intentions of
replacing the weakened European labor force.

The boxed in area shows a part of the Chesapeake
Bay area and the area in which the English founded Jamestown,
VA.

On arrival, the Africans
were hired for a specific term of service as indentured servants. At first,
slaves and servants worked together as equal partners. Sobel, in his book entitled, The World They Made Together
quotes Elizabeth Spring, an indentured servant who discusses this
relationship: Servants and slaves worked together, drank together, often
lived together…sharing the same rough life, the same hardships, the same
abuse. Whites, women as well as men, ‘slaved’ under overseers holding
sticks, working in the ground, carrying, or fetching of rails or loggs or the like things and beating at the morter” (Sobel,44).

This relationship, however, soon began to lose change as
slaves lost the equality that was once established with the whites, resulting
in a change of status. As the two different races became more and more
interwoven with one another, the white upper class began to fear a rise in
black power. Soon, slaves began to make up the majority of the labor
force, while the whites began to take over different positions. (Sobel, 47).No
longer were they working as indentured servants, but if seen on the plantations
at all, it was to oversee the work of the slaves.

In the early seventeenth century, the number of blacks arriving in the Chesapeake area was extremely
small.As a result of the economy based
on labor-intensive tobacco this number grew tremendously.

-Between the years of 1700-1770 the number of blacks
grew from 13,000 to 250,000.

-Between the year 1750 there was an estimated
165,000 blacks, mostly slaves, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

(“The
Civil War, Slavery, and the Chesapeake Bay.”)

It was, however, in 1790 that the soil became depleted from over
planting and the strong demand for slaves was no longer an issue, and as a
result some blacks were freed.

The relationship between the
blacks and the whites was a consistent power struggle, in which the whites felt
threatened anytime the Africans gained any sort of recognition. It was,
however, in the nineteenth century that the blacks began to make a living as watermenand began harvesting oysters,
working on vegetable farms, canning vegetables, picking crabs, etc.

This is an image of freed slaves working with the crabs and
oysters brought in by the watermen.

Once again, however, in 1836 the upper class attempted to prevent
the blacks from prospering by passing a new bill, forbidding blacks from
captaining any vessel large enough it need be registered. The bill also
stated that any owner who violates this bill would have their boats seized and
sold. The blacks, in response to this new bill, continued to work on the
boats as crew, shipbuilding, or captaining by subterfuge, legally or not.
(“African-American
Watermen:General Information.” 3)Most blacks that continued to work on
board, however, usually had the complicity or protection of some whites on
board as well.

Although free blacks were still facing extreme
discrimination (watermen), there was an attempt to end slavery as early as the
late 1700s. As the work force became dominantly black, the colonies began
to split into two sections differing by attitudes considering slavery.

This
is an image of slavery during a year or so prior to the Civil War.

It was in 1780 that the
Pennsylvania Legislature passed a law providing for the gradual abolition of
slavery. The Legislature argued that America went to war to earn its own
freedom, why wouldn’t every man be considered free.

It wasn’t until three years later that the Massachusetts
Supreme Court agreed that slavery did violate “the natural rights of
man.” Later, Connecticut, Rhode
Island, New Jersey,
and New York all came to the same
agreement, and passed a law agreeing to gradually abolish slavery. The
Southern states, however, were absolutely dependent on slavery in order to
continue with their successful economy

Again in 1783, Maryland,
frustrated, passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves. North
Carolina agreed and in 1786 increased the duty on the
importation of slaves. In other words, the amount of slaves being brought
into the country was severely reduced. Finally, in 1807 the Federal
Government officially terminated the slave trade, although it didn’t stop
entirely until after the Civil War.

Once the war ended, black labor was still an essential
part of the Chesapeake Bay area. Although this was
a time in which the black population began to experience their own freedom, it
was also the beginning of the “separate but equal” time period. This was
a time in which the white population used violence against blacks as a form of
race control. It was also a time in which the blacks became subject to
the “Jim Crow” laws that segregated hotels, steamboats, passenger trains,
etc. (“Black Experience in America.” 3)

This is an image of “RexTheatre:For Colored People.”

These laws, originated from the Black Codes, which were
enforced from 1865 to 1866, existing mainly in the South.